After we posted a photo of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Apple SVP Jony Ive, and 10 other powerful and connected Silicon Valley executives having dinner, a couple of sources mentioned that these dinners are a monthly event and have been going on for a while.

Sometimes they're posh events at restaurants like The French Laundry. Sometimes they're more homespun affairs at an executive's home.

These CEO dinners, it seems, are one of the tech world's open secrets. There's a regular crew, centered around Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia and Google executive Mike Cassidy. Both Tolia and Cassidy, as it happens, have been entrepreneurs-in-residence at Benchmark Capital.

A March 2012 profile of Tolia mentions a "supper club" of influential tech figures. This appears to be the fruition of that plan.

Tolia is a veteran networker, having cofounded a less hoity-toity business-networking group, Round Zero, which flourished during the first dotcom boom. He subsequently drew scrutiny for making up an academic degree and a stint at McKinsey on his resume, which led him to step down from his job as COO of Shopping.com, a product-search company later acquired by eBay. (At the time, he had not finished the paperwork to receive his degree from Stanford; the university later conferred it.) That blot on his career history, which led him to spend a few years in exile from the tech world in the middle of the past decade, has not hurt him with Silicon Valley insiders.